Chapter Two: Thirty Days

Damien's POV

There is a kind of pain that shouldn't be possible for something that isn't a wound. I know that now. I didn't, before tonight.

I took a blade to the ribs once, three summers ago, defending our northern border from a rogue pack that thought a young Alpha meant a soft one. I remember thinking, in the delirious clarity that comes right after steel parts muscle, that nothing could hurt worse than that.

I was wrong. This is worse. This feels like something has reached inside my chest and closed a fist around whatever it is that keeps a person tethered to living.

"Get him inside." My mother's voice, sharper than I'd ever heard it, fear threading through words that were usually so carefully composed. "Now — before the whole pack sees their Alpha crawling in the dirt like a wounded pup."

Too late for that. I could already hear it behind us, rippling through the clearing in low, frightened murmurs. *The Goddess. She's punishing him. Did you see his eyes go black?*

I hadn't seen my own eyes. But I'd felt something shift behind them the moment the guards dragged Dara past the tree line — some part of me going dark and hollowed out, like a room after the last candle gutters.

They carried me into the pack house and laid me on the same bed I'd slept in since I was a boy small enough to still believe his mother's word was law without question. I lay there shaking while Elder Mackenzie pressed her palm flat to my sternum and murmured words in a tongue older than the pack itself, older maybe than the mountains around us.

When she finally lifted her hand, her face had gone the gray of cold ash.

"Tell me." My voice sounded like gravel dragged over stone.

"You rejected a true mate bond." She chose each word with the care of someone defusing something that might still explode. "Not an arranged pairing. Not a convenient match blessed by a council vote. A true bond — blessed by the Goddess herself, the kind that comes once, if it comes at all."

"I know what I did." The words tasted like something curdled in my mouth. "Tell me what's happening to me now."

"The bond doesn't simply die because you deny it, Alpha." She had never called me *Alpha* like that before — like the title itself had become an accusation she was leveling at me. "It turns inward instead. It becomes a curse in place of a blessing. And curses of this kind only end one way."

My mother, rigid by the door, finally found her voice. "How long does he have?"

Elder Mackenzie's eyes never left mine. "Thirty days. Perhaps less, if he keeps fighting it the way he's fighting it now."

*Thirty days.*

I almost laughed — a horrible, humorless thing that never made it past my throat. Thirty days ago I hadn't known this decision would break something in me that couldn't be unbroken afterward. Thirty days ago I still believed my mother when she told me duty outweighed a mate bond, that the Adeyemi line was beneath a Cross Alpha, that Dara's blood — however sweet it had once tasted in stolen kisses behind the training yard, in the dark, where no one could see us being young and unguarded together — wasn't blood our pack could build a future on.

"There's a cure." I said it as a demand, not a question, because I refused to let it be anything less. "There has to be a cure."

The silence stretched long enough that my mother finally snapped, "Well? Speak, Elder."

"The only cure," Mackenzie said quietly, "is the bond itself, willingly restored. She has to choose you back, Alpha. Not out of pity. Not out of duty. She has to want the bond as fiercely as the Goddess wanted it for the two of you, once."

I thought of Dara's face in the clearing — the way she'd looked at me like she was still waiting for this to reveal itself as some cruel joke, still waiting for me to take it all back before it became permanent.

And then I thought of what replaced that look. The hollow, wrecked stillness that settled over her instead, more dangerous somehow than if she'd screamed at me, than if she'd clawed my face open in front of the whole pack. I would have understood that. I would have deserved it.

"She'll never take me back." My voice dropped low. "Not after what I did to her tonight, in front of everyone who ever mattered to either of us."

My mother's jaw tightened into something hard and unmoving. "Then you'll simply have to convince her, won't you."

"You did this." The words came out closer to a growl than a voice, my wolf pressing hard against my ribs for the first time all night, straining against skin that suddenly felt too small to hold either of us. "You told me the Adeyemi line was cursed blood, unworthy of a Luna's mark. You made me stand in front of the entire pack and destroy the one thing that actually mattered to me—"

"I did what was necessary to protect this pack's future." Her voice cracked like a whip through the room. "I didn't know the Goddess would answer a broken bond with *this*. No one has witnessed a curse like this in three generations, Damien. Not one."

"Then you had better hope," I said, closing my eyes against another black wave crawling up my throat, "that I find a way to survive long enough to fix whatever mistake you've made."

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**Dara's POV**

Chidi's cousin kept a cabin two hours past the border, small and half-forgotten, tucked so deep into forest that didn't belong to any pack's official territory that even the moonlight seemed to lose interest before it reached the door. We arrived just before dawn, my legs finally giving out the instant the door shut behind us, folding me down onto the floorboards like something with the strings cut.

"You should eat something." Chidi crouched in front of me, worry carved deep into every line of her face, the kind of worry that comes from watching someone you love disappear a little further into themselves. "You haven't eaten since yesterday morning, Dara."

"I'm not hungry."

"Dara—"

"I said I'm not hungry, Chidi." Sharper than I meant it to land. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes, willing the burn there to stay unshed, stay swallowed, stay anywhere but on my face where it could be seen. I would not cry. Not over him. Not after everything he'd just done to me in front of three hundred witnesses.

She sat back on her heels, quiet for a long moment. When she finally spoke again, her voice had gone careful, testing the air like she was checking ice for cracks. "What Elder Mackenzie said back there. About the Goddess punishing a broken bond." She hesitated. "Do you think it's real? What's happening to him?"

I thought of the black veins crawling up Damien's throat like something alive and hungry. I thought of his whole massive, powerful body folding to the ground like something snapping cleanly in half.

"I don't know," I said, and it was honest. "And I don't care."

The lie sat bitter on my tongue even as I said it, curdling there the way bad milk curdles — unmistakable, impossible to ignore once you've tasted it.

Because some small, traitorous part of me — the part that still remembered summer afternoons and honeycomb and a boy who used to look at me like I was the only worthwhile thing in any given room — already knew I was going to care, eventually, whether I wanted to or not.

I just didn't know yet how much it would end up costing me to find that out.

A knock sounded at the cabin door — three short raps, careful, deliberate, nothing like the frantic pounding I might have expected from someone in distress.

Chidi's whole body went rigid beside me. "No one knows we're here."

I rose slowly, every instinct in my body sounding some quiet alarm, and crossed to the door.

I opened it to find Kai standing on the porch, breathing hard like he'd run the entire distance, his eyes dark with something caught between fear and urgency, some emotion I didn't yet have a name for.

"Dara." His voice came out rough, wrecked around the edges. "You need to come back."

"Absolutely not." Chidi stepped up beside me, arms crossed tight over her chest like a wall she was building in real time. "Have you lost your mind? They just threw her out into the road—"

"It's Damien." Kai's eyes never left mine, and something in them made my stomach drop before he'd even finished the sentence, before the words had fully landed. "He's dying, Dara. And you're the only one who can save him."